If developing and increasing your creative capability is part of your personal growth program, disciplined work may be a better route to success than trying to cultivate “inspiration”.

In discussing the process of innovation, Brewster Ghiselin, in his book, The Creative Process, says:

“A great deal of the work necessary to equip and activate the mind for the spontaneous part of invention must be done consciously and with an effort of will. Mastering accumulated knowledge, gathering new facts, observing, exploring, experimenting, developing technique and skill, sensibility, and discrimination, are all more or less conscious and voluntary activities. The sheer labor of preparing technically for creative work, consciously acquiring the requisite knowledge of a medium and skill in its use, is extensive and arduous enough to repel many from achievement.”

He notes that it does not matter how smart or innately creative a person may be – they still need to do the requisite work to master the fundamentals of the creative field they are interested in:

“Even the most energetic and original mind, in order to reorganize or extend human insight in any valuable way, must have attained more than ordinary mastery of the field in which it is to act, a strong sense of what needs to be done, and skill in the appropriate means of expression.”

If, then, we are interested in being involved in a particular creative activity as part of furthering our personal development potential ,we need to be prepared to put in the hard work to thoroughly learn the elements of that creative field.

Knowing this truth would help decrease the frustration many of us can feel when we embark on a “creative” pursuit but find at the start that we do not have any creative insights on the subject matter involved.

Simply put, we need to pay our dues (work) before we can reap any creative rewards.